Plot
Riversend in the US. The first and only corporate run city in the world. The place where it all begins...and ends.
Follow the story of high school student Jason Smith who lives in the city since his birth. Define who he is. What his hobbies are.
And whom he calls a friend. See his life and story unfold during Riversend's darkest hour.

After an incident in the middle of the night, all hell breaks out over the city as an acopolypse erupts. Monsters out of the legends come back into the light.
And hordes of the undead try to consume everything in their path. With people dying left and right Jason is trying to survive, but gets himself infected
by a tainted form of immortality. And you? You alone decide his fate.

Will he despair and give in to the taint itself and become a true monster right out of the blackest nightmares?
Or will he throw off the shackles of the curse and save his humanity?
Will he be a destroyer or a saviour?
Will he survive or meet his final end?

The decision...it is all yours.

Game Features

Game type: Unique mix between RPG and Visual Novel

Resolution: 1366 x 768

VN & RPG: The RPG and the VN are neatlessly integrated in each other (see below for more), with your stats defining your chances to succeed on the options you choose.

Dialogue options: Every choice has consequences. Some immediately, some only later in the game with some having recuring ones

Love & Romance: Even in the apocalypse you can find love and romance. There are more than 3 romance options open for you depending on your choices.

Horror: During the apocalypse you will be able to meet and talk to or fight different types of mythic creatures. Meet over 4 different species including vampires, werewolves and naturally zombies.

Knowledge is power: Find not only a CG library, but also an ingame accessable knowledge database that lets you know what you have learned so far ingame and thus gives you the power of knowledge about what is going on, and who is who.

Define the protagonist: You can define where he comes from, what his hobbies are, who his friends are and also how he handles the situation and his own infection. Your decisions will let him become a saviour or a monster bent on death and destruction.

RPG and VN
As mentioned this game is a unique mix between VN and RPG. Why unique?
In most games this means its either an rpg grinding feast with a few VN elements strewn in, or the exact opposite. A VN with rpg minigames.

This game is different. There is no grinding, and there are no levels. And that despite a very strong connection between the RPG and the VN parts.
You gain XP by doing the main story and doing additional chapters (or quests). These XP you can spend directly on improving your stats or unlocking abilities.
Unlocking an ability can lead to new chapters being unlocked and played through. And what is more is that these new abilities can have an effect on your available dialogue options.

So how is it avoided that you need to do grinding quests instead of monsters? Easy: You can play through the game with doing just the main story. The "side quests" or additional chapters
will just make it a bit easier to play through.

So much for the RP only part. In the VN part you will have dialogue options available as usual. What is unique here is that first the abilities you unlock in the RP part will have an effect
on your available dialogue choices (and also in some cases a direct effect on the dialogue itself). And secondly your attributes and skill ranks define the chances you have with succeeding at specific dialogue options. Like your Presence attribute and persuasion skill defining your chances at persuading others to do something or to not do something.

Additionally your choices in the VN part can have a direct effect on the RPG part. Not only creating new encounters or enabling you to avoid them but also directly affecting your stats in the RP part (like giving you access to new abiltiies or learning a new skill or increasing an attribute, ...).

Thus all in all the RP part and the VN part are strongly connected and influence each other strongly.

What is more is, that the names for things will be taken from tabletop gaming and not computer gaming. Thus attributes are attributes as normal, but skills will not be the special powers and moves,
but instead be something like deceit, stealth, persuasion, ... . The powers and abilities themselves are called powers / abilities each.

CharactersJason Smith
The protagonist of the game. He is an almost 18 years old brown haired student at Riversend High. He and his twin sister after whom he looks very often lived their whole lives in the city.
Due to the incidents during the apocalypse gets infected with a tainted form of immortality.
Who he was before this and what he will become. If a true monster or a saviour is up to you.

Maria Smith
The younger twin of the two siblings is a red haired beauty. She is quite a book worm and wants to attend college after the High school in order to become a doctor and help people. She is
headstrong and loves horror films a lot. And despite him getting on her nerves for looking out for her so often on their parents wishes, she loves her brother dearly.

???
A mysterious beautiful raven haired girl. She appears time and again just before or after something big happens. Somehow despite him not knowing her at all, she seems to know quite a lot about Jason and his family. She seems to be right in the center of what is going down in the city.

The 3 brothers
A group of 3 best friends who formed a 3 man gang during their early teens. They soon became widely known and feared by the gangs of Riversend as they survived every attempt at squashing them and in return squashing the gangs that tried. Despite this none of them suffered any consequences for their actions leading others to believe that someone very high up seems to keep a hand over them.

Steve Steel
A red haired good looking newbie pay cop. He is one of the "3 brothers" and the most charismatic of the 3. Despite his new job he still throws one party after the other and ditches his girlfriend for a new one every few weeks.

Peter Wolf
A black haired almost androgynous looking guy. He is a student at Riversend High and one of the "3 brothers". If Steve holds the 3 together and Mike is the brains of the group, Peter is the muscles. His aggressiveness and ability to jump to conclusion combined with his protectiveness of those he holds dear led to others calling him just "Wrath".

Mike Slozensky
A blonde haired student at Riversend High. He is one of the "3 brothers" and a genius when it comes to computers and technology. He is the founder of the occult research club at school and quite paranoid. Despite this and a strange aversion he feels for her he often becomes involved in and the victim of Eves plots and intrigues. His envy of others led to him gaining the nickname Envy.

Eve Wolf - Lust
A brown haired beauty she is one of the students of Riversend High. She is quite a flirt and often changes her boyfriend. Due to this and her many plots she is often called the queen of intrigue or just Lust. This is though behind her back as her sibling Wrath won't let anyone call her that openly.

Isabella Rodriguez
A raven haired shy girl. She is the granddaughter of the leader of the blood claw gang. Despite her heritage and herself being part of the gang, she is always looking out for others and caring.

Katherine Draculesco
A pale faced red haired beauty who studies at Riversend High and works part time at GEN-Tech. Despite her perfect english she seems to hail from an eastern Europe country. Despite being relatively new in Riversend and very young and only working part time there she seems to have risen exceptionally high within the ranks of GEN-Techs scientists and she seems to know a lot of what is really going on in the city and about the incidents.

???
A mysterious pale faced blonde girl. She seems to hide a painful and mysterious past and harbors a strong hatred for GEN-Tech. Despite this there seems to be a strong connection between her and Katherine.

Groups and organizationsGEN-Tech
The company conglomerate that created and is owning the city of Riversend. They are conducting biotechnological and also genetic research within its compounds and are doing a lot of charity work. Still though there are rumors abounding about them because of a rising number of disappearances within the cities compounds and the never under control gang problem, that they are into way darker activities than one might think.

Riversend Police Corps
When the state driven police wasn't enough to get the gang problem in Riversend under control it was replaced by the Riversend Police Corps. A security company that is a subsidiary of the GEN-Tech conglomerate. Despite them often being called rent cops, many are joining the corps in order to be able to help people. Or in order to gain a prestigious position and go from there into the city council. Which is the only way for non scientists to get there.

Blood Claw Gang
They are the largest and most territorial of all the gangs. They are always hunting other gangs and also criminals in groups and making sure that their territory is under control and save. They regularly clash with the police corps and GEN-Tech and are quite brutal, but always are looking out for one another. There some strange rumours coursing about them with the least being that they employ lesser gangs to keep their territories save. Others say that they are not humans but monsters, because they never lose a battle.

CGs

A fire in the night (chapter 2):

Watched and catched (chapter 1):

Satiated hunger (chapter 2):

Last edited by Ryue on Mon Mar 13, 2017 5:52 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Update 15.08.2016
The past weeks I've used to test and correct the tabletop rpg system I'm basing the rpg part of the game upon. "Correct" in so far that I wrote a whole system just for the purpose of this game (and the other games I'm planing). And I changed things that did not work out well enough or felt too cumbersome in the tests I ran (and am still running). These tests are done as rpg sessions featuring different settings and types of characters, so that I can round things out well enough to fit what I have in mind. Furthermore my editor just returned the latest part to me (including the dream), so that I can now fully concentrate on the dark fires in the night and red eyes in the darkness.

About plans: I'm planing on using the character creation and the whole chapter 1 as the first demo when they are finished. Thus the first demo will contain these two complete parts, with later demos containing a few more chapters (just enough so that the whole "prologue" is done. Which should be about chapter 3 with the current planing...although this could change if during the beta tests we find out something needs to be further elaborated, ...).

Additionally I got totally swamped in work at my job else I would have probably finished at least dark fires in the meantime already

Info
After seeing it done for other projects (also non game projects) and liking what I saw I will time and again post a few details about elements of the game. Things like how some things work in the background and/or foreground and what they are standing for, ... . If anyone has questions or comments feel free to post here or send me a pm. Also if you want more informations on something just let me know.

Like always I love constructive critique (good and bad), as it helps to set things straight how the audience will see things in the game. This is quite important as it is just to go into a wrong direction, or to concentrate on things that others find distracting from the game itself, or just pure crap, ... . For that a reality check is always quite important and good.

This can be done in two ways. The first one is giving out demos to beta testers or the public and the second way is to post details about parts of the game. How it works, what specific elements are about and what some parts of the plot are about and see what people say in response. Thus what the feedback is. And then adapt from there.

The first of these trivia posts will be some general informations about the rpg part (how it works generally) and the structure of the story.

Trivia Part 1 - RPG and story structure
As mentioned already I'm beginning to post some informations about the elements of the game. The first part of these informations will be about the rpg aspect and the story structure.

RPG PARTGeneral
As I have mentioned already I created a tabletop rpg system to use as basis for the rpg part of my game.
One of the corner stones here was flexibility. After quite a few attempts I managed to achieve this in a way so that I could easily
stat out a normal human student and also Zeus and they can succeed at what is logical for them to be successfull at and fail at things where its logical for them to fail.
(who of us normal humans could ever win against Hercules in a rope pulling match?)

Corner stones of the rpg system:

No leveling!

No grinding!

Attributes: 8 in total (4 physical and 4 mental/social). Attributes have a total maximum rank of 15 each for supernaturals of the highest order and 6 for human beings

Skills: The system knows over 20 skills in total and each skill can have up to 6 ranks each.

No leveling
One of my goals was to build a system where I don't have to wait a full level and grind for it in order to learn that fireball spell I so want. Thus I chose the approach of a
levelless system. This means that all the xp you earn can be spent directly to learn new abilities and skills or increase existing ones (and attributes). The choice of what you increase
is as always (even in the computer game) yours and yours alone. Thus you want to have more hit points. Either gain an ability that gives them, or increase your constitution attribute.
The only "levels" that exist are the so called "power levels" which only represents how much supernatural you are. These are in essence just limits for your supernatural abilities and
for nothing else.

No grinding
Another goal I had was to make sure one thing won't happen which I loath in almost every rpg I played so far: The need to grind!
I always hated it when I easily beat all normal enemies in the stage and then needed to grind for 3 hours to be able to even harm the boss of the area.
This was another main point for my decision to make a (mostly) levelless system. That alone did not achieve this though. For the grinding to be of no concern I needed to do away
with something most rpgs use: XP per mob beaten. Thus you don't get xp for every single zombie you slay, but instead for beating subchapters of the game. How much troubles you had in that
defines how much xp you gain. Thus the higher the difficulty you faced, the more xp you gain (and the higher the chances are for a game over or an other bad outcome).

So is the number of xps severly limited in the game? No. I'm doing lots and lots of sub plots and quests which are completely optional. So depending on your choices you can gain lots of xp,
but you will also be able to succeed if you only gain the main story xps. Although it will be harder with just those. Furthermore your own choices can define how difficult things are for you
and thus how much xp you gain (do you take the help of the soldier or try to fend off the zombies on your own, ... Do you try to convince the gang to help you in defending the shopping mall or
take the easy route of giving that hideout up?, ...).

Skill rolls
In the game skill rolls can happen on three different occasions.
1.) During decisions
2.) During the storyparts themselves
3.) During combat

Regardless where they happen you will see a notice that a skill roll happened alongside the info which attributes and skills were used (for decisions it is mostly stated in the decision dialogue
itself already so that you can decide if you want to take the risk of this or that decision). The roll is then 3d6 + attribute modifier + skill modifier. Thus the higher your attribute or skill
the better your chances at succeeding. The result of the roll...thus the outcome will be shown seamlessly inside the story text (or the combat text).

STORY STRUCTURE
The story like most others is splitted into chapters and subchapters. In total I currently have planed about 10 chapters which tell the story of how you survive the apocalypse (or die in it).
This number though can change depending on the playtests (thus if more chapters are needed or if some feel like they should be cut).

The outline for the first few chapters is as follows:

Chapter 0 is what I call the prologue. It details the setting and already gives you important decisions like your hobbies, who your friends were while you grew up, ... . The effects of these
decisions are quite heavy as they define your characters starting values (and also influence already how others react to him).

Chapter 1 is the beginning if you want to say so. It sets the stage for what is to come and foreshadows it with an incident happening.

Chapter 2 is about your last day on a normal earth.

Chapter 3 is about finding out what happened to the world and you. And that you find out that you have to make a decision on what you want to be. A human. Or a monster.
This decision is not there to make though. It is made over the course of the story. Only here you already find out that you have to make this decision and that it will have consequences for you
and the survivors around you.

As mentioned earlier the first demo will contain the chapter 1. The plan is to later include at least chapter 2 in demos (maybe even chapter 3, but not 100% on that at the current state).

As for the length. Each chapter is a logical unit long. Thus it is about 1 great topic inside the book (prologue, the beginning, ....). Then it consists of several sub chapters. These are all text parts and decisions belonging to a small story part (a single small topic). These can be "A mysterious dream", or "the incident at night", ... .
For sub chapters I try to see to it that they are between 2k and 10k words large (except in some cases where it makes sense to not split a large part up, or where a small part is important enough to not be integrated into another sub chapter).

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As usual if you have comments, remarks, critique or questions let me know. Also if you wish to know more about any part let me know there.
Thanks.

It's amazing to see how much thought you've put into this. c: I'm very impressed by the fact that you created your own tabletop RPG system to implement into the game, that can't have been an easy task.

Zelan wrote:It's amazing to see how much thought you've put into this. c: I'm very impressed by the fact that you created your own tabletop RPG system to implement into the game, that can't have been an easy task.

Yeah creation of the rpg system was one of the hardest two parts (the other was the creation of the 3d engine for the original game...not sure which of the two was harder to create).

The original game has an earlier variant implemented and this game here the newest. In total I needed 4 full years to get the system into a running condition.
Creating a working rpg system was not so the problem (that was easy and I had that within days back then). The main problem was that I wanted to balance things out and have the flexibility to stat up a normal guy and also Zeus without having to use "you got a strength of 100 ranks as a god". And that really threw me into a loop.
As every attempt I made broke down just there. Either it worked only for god level beings or for mundane ones and broke for the other.

During the design processs I tried out different "open source" rpg systems to see if I can adapt those to my needs. Fuzion, D6, pathfinder, ... . But all had their own problems or similar to what I had faced. Then last year I began to specifically make test rounds (aka I ran sessions with players on roll20) using super hero systems and looked how they worked and what they are good at and what their weaknesses are.

Funnily one of the oldest rpgs featured many things I needed without having the weaknesses I began to hate.
The marvel superhero rpg (the one from the 80s!) managed to portray mundanes up to thor, ... . The only thing they didn't have was a full blown skill system. And the balancing between the different types of heroes was...way off. Someone with a deity origin was the strongest guy in the group regardless what he did.
Thus as first step I began to put in house rules to see how that could be balanced out and how a skill system could work with such a system.
Then I ran my test games and analyzed HOW marvel managed to achieve what so many others utterly failed at.

The results of that analysis (and my prior experience (during the testings) with the other rpgs (especially d6 was very interesting there)) then went into my own design process and I used it to create my 3d6 based rpg system (in contrast to marvels d100). Furthermore I also eliminated what I saw as weaknesses of many rpgs. The "opposing roll". In essence if you try to sneak up to someone you roll your stealth and he his perception. I reduced these rolls by saying "ok the defending guy NEVER rolls. Instead a default value is used for his dice roll and his attribute + skill is added to that". Only a handful rpg systems go down that route as it removes the possibility to have critical successes on defenses,... . But the main thing here is that it reduces the number of rolls needed for any action dramatically and thus increases the speed of any game session dramatically.
Also it makes things a bit easier which is why I left it at that even for the computer version (even though I don't need the speedup here).

But so one lession I learnt bitterly back then was that almost every rpg is designed to work for only a very narrow range of character types that are created with their rules and break for all others (aka fuzion works only really with above average human characters created as you else have a fail chance of over 90% on each roll). For others they work for a wide range of characters, but need a lot of rulings so that you can balance things out (example d6. You need either increase the "size rating" for specific dice rolls made by your char or you need to have HUGE levles for your strength if you want to throw cruise ships). Only a few offer both a wide range of possible characters they support without breaking and not having to buy up hundreds of levels in attributes to achieve what you want. And these are the oldest rpg systems out there. The downside for these are most often that they either lack a skill system, or have troubles with the combat rules (or you have so many rules and a point buy system that you need to have a math degree to really be able to get a char up and running).

All in all quite a lot of work and I got to know the insides and outsides of a lot of rpg systems way better than I had before (and I now understand the advantages and disadvantages of those very good......which is quite an advantage for my rpg sessions if I decide to run games again using one of these systems ).

As a big tabletop RPG fan (I typically GM but I do actually like being a player more lmao), I have to say that I am excited for this! It's interesting (and very ambitious of you) to make a system for this game and I'm interested in knowing how it works. The way you came about making it is intriguing as well, lots of testing and experimentation it seems. It also seems like a lot of work and research went into it, which also makes me really excited to see where this game goes. As someone who's not the biggest fan of grinding, I'm glad you've excluded it from the game and the way to gain XP is very interesting (and very tabletop game-like, which is a plus).

Smudgeed wrote:As a big tabletop RPG fan (I typically GM but I do actually like being a player more lmao), I have to say that I am excited for this! It's interesting (and very ambitious of you) to make a system for this game and I'm interested in knowing how it works. The way you came about making it is intriguing as well, lots of testing and experimentation it seems. It also seems like a lot of work and research went into it, which also makes me really excited to see where this game goes. As someone who's not the biggest fan of grinding, I'm glad you've excluded it from the game and the way to gain XP is very interesting (and very tabletop game-like, which is a plus).

Anyway, looking forward to this! Good luck

Tnx if you have any questions let me know. And yepp tested quite a lot there. Btw I feel your pain. I somehow always end up gming......and 70% of the games where
I managed to be just a player......I ran up walls because the gm ignored what chars did if he hadn't preplaned, or he was using only dice rolls instead of talk + dice rolls
(I'm not made for "full" rpg games....I just need a mix between rpg and storytelling). So it all comes down to me gming again.....^^'

Update 23.08.2016
Things at work seem to be cooling down and I'm managing to get some things done at long last for the game. I wrote down a couple of thousands words for the next part, but began to run in circles then, finding out the hard way that the more decision heavy / roll heavy parts are a bit too much for me without making a flow chart (4-15 decisions/roll results I can handle with ease but this one here has quite a lot more). So now I'm currently doing flow charts for the first sub chapter (and with that I'm seeing that even when I saw that the part is way bigger than I had first thought.....I grossly underestimated its size and the number of possible pathes within). And afterwards I'm going to rewrite the whole sub chapter (I was at 75% of the original idea/size before with a couple of thousands word length for it).
Currently I'm guessing that it will probably be between 7-10k in words.

So to show a bit what I'm talking about here I'll post a small screenshot from the flowchart I'm currently creating.
But before that some explanation.
As mentioned I split the whole game into chapters and subchapters. With each chapter containing a few subchapters. And chapters being like book chapters. Great parts of the book that are linked by chronology and topic. Sub chapters are smaller parts there, each containing in essence only 1 single topic or chronology of events. The sub chapters themselves are consisting of multiple scenes. With each scene being a very small thing. Like 5 minutes of chronological events as examples, or 1 conversation, ... .

So for the example I'll put in some details and small examples:

Chapter: Fires in the night (begins with a nightmare sub chapter, has the earthquake subchapter and then an investigation and last a red eyes in the night sub chapter).
Sub chapter: In the example below its the Earthquake subchapter. It starts with what looks like an earthquake and ends with the character either going to sleep (next chapter) or trying to investigate what woke him up in the middle of the night (investiagtion).
Scene: I'll put in examples of two small scenes, which happen during the sub chapter and depending on the players decision can come multiple ways to happen there (and in the case of the Looking outside scene (or part how I call it in the prototype of the flow chart....part being a placeholder word for scene) it can happen multiple times during the course of the sub chapter.

Going back to sleep

Looking outsideClick the above image to open it in its full size

Like I mentioned these are just 2 scenes of that (small) sub chapter. The sub chapter itself consists of atm 4 different scenes. 2 extremely short (going back to sleep, a rude awakening), short (looking outside) and one longer one (helping sister). The scenes are interconnected and the 2 examples above can be called from any of the 2 other chapters (in the case of the longer one even multiple times).

Ingame then there will be small interludes shown when the player reaches a new chapter or a new sub chapter (but not for each scene as that would destroy any immersion). So the names of the scenes are only given my the flow chart and the examples given. The player won't ever hear of them.

The example scenes show off a bit how complex the pathes are and also how the skill rolls are integrated into the story.
Like mentioned before the results can be: Critical success, success, failure, critical failure. Some scenes only differentate between success and failure, and some others differentate stronger (depending on what is needed for the scene). The difference in terms of story effects can vary very slightly, or even drastically.
As example in another scene you try to catch your falling sister. You can catch her, she slips your hand or you both tumble to the ground. Each of which can have different effects in terms of the story and also the flags. As your sister likes that you catch her and will be unhappy with you if you let her fall (which modifies your relationship with her).

As always let me know what you think (and if anyone has any tips or ideas also always let me know).

Edit:
A bit of info there at the start of the chapter you get awakened very rudely. Your sister also awakens and begins to scream. You have the option then later on to calm her down, or just head back to sleep, ... . Which is refered in the examples. The "Decisions" in the examples are NO player decisions, but solely flags and skill rolls.
"Return to caller" is just "end of scene" continue with wherever from the scene was called from.

Update 27.08.2016
So got a nasty cold, but still managed to get a few things done.
I took the prototype for the flow charts I posted last time and began to create the final flow charts from it. During the process it grew quite a lot again, but now looks nicely.

Currently still in the process of getting completed are 1 big scene and 1 medium sized scene: "Help sister" and "Investigate". The others are finished flowchartwise now.
The main problem with these scenes is their interconnectivity as some can come up multiple times depending on decisions (you can look out of the window while still in your room, or when you helped your sister OR when you came back from there as example).

In the end I plan to put up the flowcharts for the whole subchapter as it is a good showcase of how complex the game is going to be, and how many options will be available. Furthermore it also nicely showcases the skill rolls and how much they can affect the story. One thing that many VNs don't have is that the decisions you make can fire back at you if you are not good at what you are trying to do. The skill rolls are very good at introducing this. Thus if you want to do something.....you should better be good at it, else there is a good chance you fail in a fashion that fires back at you (even leading to you loosing "relationship points"). Also sometimes (as is the case in these scenes) you can make a comeback from a bad skill roll (like when you try to calm your sister and fail disastriously).

One thing of note here too is that I try to give EVERY skill a chance to shine. So there will be many quests and subquests where one skill or another is quite important and it can get quite hard to succeed without them (as example: You can't scare off the gang and need to fight through all of them instead of walking peacefully through their territory).

--------

A bit also on the rpg side. Although the rpg system itself is standing I'm still testing it on roll20 in a few campaigns I'm playing there (1 being a godling campaign where you play either reborn gods or the sons and daughters of gods and mortals in the modern times.....so a bit like the Hercules series just set in the modern times and you a bit more powerful than him already from the start). A few things there have already changed (details mostly) and I'm using the lessons learnt there to modify the rpg system also in the computer game time and again, so that I don't run into the same problems/situations. Though so far it is details only. As example: Which skills you gain from elementary school, middle school and high school. So it currently affects the character creation only.

Then to the flow charts. As mentioned "Investigate" and "Help Sister" are currently in the works with "Help Sister" probably being longer and more complex as it seems atm than "Investigate". The other 4 flow charts are already finished (the first one details how the sub chapters work, the 2nd one is the flowchart for the detailed subchapter as a whole and the other 2 are already scenes.

The overview over the whole chapterClick the above image to open it in its full size

Main path through chapter "Dark Fires In The Night" subchapter "The Earthquake"Click the above image to open it in its full size

The scene "Head Back To Sleep"Click the above image to open it in its full size

The scene "Look Outside"Click the above image to open it in its full size

As always if you have any comments, questions or critiques or would like details on something feel free to post here or send me pms.

Update 18.09.2016
Sooo the last few weeks were very busy for me...sadly not in regards to the game. My job went a bit out of control and despite holidays I had to work and despite weekends.... but at least I got farer a bit still in regards to the rpg (fine tuning it with test sessions) and managed to get a bit of writing for the game down the last few days.

So where do I stand now?
Currently I finished the main part for "The Earthquake" and finished the "Head back to sleep" route. Furthermore I finished most of the "Look outside" part that takes place at the protagonists room (not his sisters).

Still open are the "Help sister" and "Investigate" routes and the sisters part of the "Look outside" part then the Earthquake sub chapter is finished.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

So far for the progress itself. Then a few sidenotes here.

First and foremost a good one: I'm in contact with my old sprite artist and she is currently in the process of designing a few sprites for the characters in this novel. As she is in again, I will also put in a few things I didn't plan on for this game...namely CGs. Maybe 1 per subchapter or 1 per chapter (how much is to be seen and currently in planing, but one thing is for sure by FAR not what I had planed for the original game...there I would have needed WAY over 70 CGs..... not including variations!).

The second sidenote is about my plans. First and foremost doing more testing of the rules and also putting in the other parts of the current subchapter. Then I have a few things on my agenda:
1.) Deciding on if I'm going to release a partial demo, or wait with a demo until the full 1st chapter is done.
2.) I'm still needing to decide on a few GUI things: Skill rolls namely.

I'm going to elaborate a bit more on the second thing: Time and again some choices the player makes have a skill roll associated with them. Here the player is seeing what skills come into play and what his chances of success are when he is doing the decision. At other times though skill rolls happen during the story itself. Here I consider about letting the player know by putting a small red text below the text box with the infos what skills, what the difficulty was (but not the result itself).

As I'm a bit undecided there, if anyone has any ideas or experience there please let me know (about a partial demo, where every few weeks another part is released,... until the full demo is there. And also about the showing of the skill rolls during story parts...here I fear about a break in the immersion, but I'm not sure there).

And as usual if anyone has questions, comments or hints/tips just let me know either here or via pm.
Tnx!

Update
So long time since the last update. Sadly way longer than I had hoped for. Even more sadly I just had no time to do an update :/ But to topic.

What happened: This time of the year is the most stressfull at my workplace and in addition (thanks to a malfunctioning climate machine and collegues who go to work while still begin sick) I got sick 2x now (currently still am) and lost over 3 weeks where I could at least do something.

What does this mean for the game? I'm way behind of where I had hoped to be at this time of the year, but at least not as far behind as my worst expectations were.

Lets split things a bit up:

Story news
The earthquake is as good as finished. I'm currently in the process of letting it beta tested and working in things that get noticed by the testers. Aside from this I only need to do a couple of more lines and that part is finished (not edited yet though!)

One thing I learned here is: Decisions that are affecting each other in sort of a loop are a nightmare in the making! Will try to avoid that for the future and stay with more treelike decision pathes (thus no "if you didn't choose a and then b then you get back in the end to this decision with all other decisions you made in this tree getting considered in the texts).

Graphics, Music and so on
Despite the game being mostly text I decided to include at least some CGs in addition to the title screen. For this I contacted my old sprite artist and as usual she made some gorgeous sprites and also CGs. I will put a few examples out when I'm nearer towards releasing the demo. Still though currently only 1 CG (here the help of the BG artist who is helping with the title screen will be needed) and the title screen itself are left open. All other CGs that are planed to exist for the demo are already done. Still though I have a few optional CGs I can order where I'm considering doing so.

One thing I want to make clear there: This does NOT change my initial approach on the game. Thus it is text first. Meaning I won't use sprites. But instead text. The CGs are just a bit of a sugar coating on top of it all.
If one wants to make a comparison: In old books there were in between the textual pages sometimes drawn sketches of the situations described. And I'm orienting myself on that.
Thus even if I leave the CGs out it won't change anything for my game!

So aside from this I've hired a componist to do some music for the game and I expect results on this side in the near future.

RPG System Front
This part has the most negative (beside my own delays as no time due to being sick and work) situation. In the last testing sessions main parts of the rules were unexpectedly found as too complicated by the players and confusing. After mulling over things a few days I found I could fix it temporarily but some balance problems would very probably turn up. Thus I took the time to reconsider all of my options and decided to use an existing system now instead of the completely homebrew one.

My decision fell here on one I used (heavily so) as inspiration for my own system: D6 from west end games. Open D6 to be more exact which is sort of a open source version of the system itself and may also be used for commercial projects,... . Thus I will use that system as the base for the RPG system. In the future I will give a few comments about the system itself and how I will show things ingame in separate posts.

One thing one needs to know here is that the values for the attribute system look confusing to those that don't know the system thus I will have to print them differently in order to give people who don't know that rpg system a good chance to see with one glance how good their character is.

Other news
Currently I have the problem that for my beta testers most have only irregularly time and only 1 of them has time regularly. With the situation now being that he made a few change requests where I'm not sure if they would be good or not. With the other testers only having time next week it would mean a delay again. Thus I will put up another post to recruit additional beta testers in order to avoid situations such as this from hampering the progress.

-----------------------------Timeplan
All in all I hope that I finish the demo this year with a possible release of it this year already or latest in January (depending on what the betas find that does not work as intended, ...).

And as usual if anyone has questions, comments or hints/tips just let me know either here or via pm.
tnx